Street Fight Daily: Yelp Sale Stalls, Twitter’s New Ads Button

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Yelp Sale Process to Stall as Founder Decides to Wait (Bloomberg)
After hiring Goldman Sachs earlier this year to explore a sale, Yelp has had several interested suitors, but is now no longer pursuing a transaction in the immediate future. In May, those familiar with the matter said an acquirer that could help Yelp connect reviewers to making purchases may entice management to sell.

Twitter Pushes Ads With a New Button Atop Mobile Users’ Profiles (TechCrunch)
By clicking on the new “Twitter Ads” button, users are offered the ability to manage their Twitter ad campaigns while on the go. The feature is currently being tested in beta.

Apple Has Filed a Patent for a New Feature That Could Kill Off Mobile Payment Apps Like Venmo, Paypal, and Square Cash (Business Insider)
Apple has filed a new patent that will let people send money to one another directly from their iPhone’s Wallet. There are a lot of person-to-person payment apps in circulation already, like Venmo and Square Cash. PayPal lets people pay both friends and merchants in stores, but still isn’t dominating mobile payments, which seems to be Apple’s plan.

Google Finally Announces Use of Google Local Reviews in Adwords (Blumenthals.com)
Mike Blumenthal: Google has finally acknowledged publicly that they were now adding Google Local reviews to Adword ads that use Location Extensions. These reviews can be seen instead of seller ratings from 3rd party sites.

Autopsy: Why Microsoft’s Ad Business Withered (Digiday)
The company was long thought a sleeping giant of the ad business, constantly making big pronouncements, seemingly having every advantage to serve as a counterweight to the growing power of Google. And yet, with a whimper this week, Microsoft beat a hasty retreat from an ad market it once seemed poise to dominate.

Is Local News Destined to be Left Behind?(Neiman Lab)
Ken Doctor: Readers continue to abandon newsprint, trading it in for digital. As importantly, publishers’ aggressive pricing policies have increased circulation revenue but keep pushing down print volumes — toward a inevitable and sooner-rather-than-later end. It’s in people though that we see the whole sense of local news reporting slipping away.